Hello

Resources

Online booklet with minimal content summaries/ further reading and complete sources:

https://marioangst.github.io/susdigi_course/

Me

Mario Angst

Lead sustainability.discourses project @ DSI, Co-Lead DSI Community Sustainability

Past: 🌊,🌲,🌾,⚡,(🛢) governance

Now: 🏙️ and 🖥️+🍀

polsci, susci, comp socsci methods (mostly network analysis, NLP, Bayesian modeling)

Biased toward strong sustainability, bikes and local solutions.

Goals

  • You are able to review core components of sustainability as a normative concept
  • You are aware of some existing frameworks to think in a structured way about relating digitalization and sustainability transformations
  • I get to talk a little bit about sustainability imaginaries in digitalization

Sustainability as a normative concept

A key differentiation

  • Sustainability as a normative concept, including its discoursive contestation and imaginaries
  • Sustainability transformations as socio-technical change processes oriented toward sustainability

The Brundtland definition

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (…)

intra- and intergenerational justice is front and center

Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.

but there were/ are many other sustainability definitions

Making sense of sustainability definitions

It all comes down to substitution of natural capital for future generations

  • weak sustainability: substitution is ok given function is retained and utility non-declining

  • strong sustainability: natural capital needs to be at least maintained

    • multi-functionality of biosphere
    • option space of future generations
    • precautionary principle

Three core strategies

So sustainability is an interconnected problem of distributive justice and resource use. Three strategies everyone should be aware of in order to reduce resource use:

  • efficiency
  • sufficiency
  • consistency

Sustainable digitalization

Starting point: The LES framework

  • Life cycle impacts
  • Enabling impacts
  • Structural impacts

Life cycle impacts

Actual material impacts

  • Production and disposal
  • Operating the infrastructure

Data center example: Energy, land…

Enabling impact

  • New actions that are enabled by digitalization (or prevented)

Three types of enabling impacts regarding resources:

  • Process optimization: Immaterial replaces material resource (information reducing travel impacts)
  • Media substitution: material replaces material resource (e-book, physical books)
  • Externalization of control: immaterial replaces immaterial (eg. centralizing a previous process optimization step)

Structural impact

Persistent macro-level changes in:

  • economic structure
  • societal institutions

LES x core strategies

Life-cycle Enabling Structural
Sufficiency
Efficiency
Consistency

Sustainability imaginaries

“In a certain sense, a sustainable world is a fiction” (Martens 2006, 40):

  • Modernization
  • Transformation
  • Control

Modernization

weak sustainability, “green growth”

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Transformation

strong sustainability, post-growth, solidarity economy

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Control

resilience, inevitability and emergency

powerful entities solve crises with emergency powers

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Sustainable digitalization imaginaries

  • Modernization: weak sustainability, green growth
    • Examples: AI for sustainability, Smart Sustainable Cities
  • Transformation: strong sustainability, solidarity economy, post-growth
    • Open source movements, right to repair, neo-luddism
  • Control: emergency, inevitability, powerful entities “solve”
    • Examples: Surveillance and ecological credit scores, Earth system geoengineering

Let’s talk

  • What is your sustainable digitalization imaginary?
  • Which imaginary will we get?
  • Where does your research fit in?
  • Sustainable practices in your life as a researcher (I have some thoughts opinions)
  • (…)